WyoFile has confirmed that a coal miner was killed early this morning at the Black Thunder mine in southern Campbell County. Killed was Jacob Dowdy, age 24, who had worked at the mine for nearly three years.

This morning I received an email from a person who was worried about friends on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation who might be freezing. She wrote, "I have Indian friends on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southern South Dakota who are freezing and they wanted to come to Gillette or another city you may recommend and bring their own pickup trucks and get some coal donated to their tribe."

Wyoming has been successful in mitigating abandoned coal mine problems, but it continues to receive large amounts of funding from the Abandoned Mine Lands Fund. That money has been spent on a variety of non-mine projects, from infrastructure to research.

There are approximately 83,000 uninsured people in Wyoming — a situation that puts families at risk of illness, bankruptcy and death — and an insurance exchange could make insurance more affordable for both small employers and their workers.

While many folks in the Powder River Basin hope that “microbial stimulation” may help prolong coal-bed methane gas production, the coal industry is seeking assurances that the process won’t degrade the quality of the coal slated for mining.